Exploitation and Dissemination of Results

The exploitation had a different focus for the different project partners:

Tool manufacturer partners: Testing Technologies, NetHawk, and CMG will, driven by commercial request, concentrate on technological advances of the TT-Medal results, giving focus on the immediate market feedback. They will exploit the results of TT-Medal to extend their core business into the new, as yet quite small but potentially extremely important business sector of componentized test development and tester tools. The TT-Medal technology and methodology together with standardised interfaces will provide them with a competitive advantage in the wider range of application domains than development of testing tools without the collaboration of TT-Medal partners.

Exploitation partners: CMG, Nokia, and Daimler Chrysler will use the project results in the framework of actions specifically dedicated to the objective of unifying the different test environments in use in the company and making seamless the transition from one environment to another. The anticipated benefit from exploiting TT-Medal results is to reduce cost, delay and risk for the development of the upcoming generation of products which pose new challenges due to the complexity created by the use of integrated modular architecture and a variety communication standards. Standardised interfaces help exploitation partners in fitting their proprietary test systems together with commercial tools of different manufacturers. This makes testing overall more efficient.

The research institutes: VTT, Fokus, and CWI will focus on the dissemination of the results and will concentrate on further scientific work on the testing methodology and technology. The research will concentrate on the continuous transfer of the newly developed results to industry and SMEs. Each research institute does applied R&D and collaborates closely with partners from industry, and especially with SMEs. Some of the research partners contribute exploitation of the results to industry by directly working for industrial cases in WP4. Therefore, they have exploited the results as background knowledge in the execution of applied R&D projects. This upcoming application scenario is of high interest for these partners working at the leading edge of applied R&D. The collaborative exploitation with commercial spin-offs will constitute a special branch of exploitation; the research institutes have already signed co-operation agreements with such organisations.

Dissemination had two major components: knowledge transfer and standardization. The knowledge transfer aimed to disseminate the new testing methodologies and processes developed within the TT-medal project. This took the form of seminars, papers and training courses that should enable European industry to integrate the new improved testing practices developed.

Standardization concentrated on two main issues, firstly standardization of the UML testing profile and secondly standardization of open test system interfaces for TTCN-3 test platforms. The UML testing profile required participation and coordination with the OMG. The open interfaces in the TTCN-3 testing platform required participation and coordination with ETSI Methods of Testing and Specification (MTS) technical committee. The intension was to initially standardize the TTCN-3 Control Interface (TCI) interface as an ETSI TR and then refine this together with the TTCN-3 Runtime Interface (TRI) to an ETSI ES document.